Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam


Malcolm X

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Morgan, Ken. "20th Anniversary of Vietnam War's End." Chicago Defender, May 23, 1995, p. 12.

Recalling the end of the Vietnam War 20 years earlier, the author points to the survival and victory of the Vietnamese people as an inspiration to African-Americans struggling against oppression in the United States today. Morgan relates a personal anecdote of his change of opinion towards the war after an encounter with relatives who saw the struggles of the Vietnamese and African-Americans as similar, if not the same. In January 1965, Malcolm X said, "The oppressed people of South Vietnam and in that entire Southeast area were successful in fighting off the agents of imperialism ... Little rice farmers, peasants with rifles up against all the highly mechanized weapons warfare ... and they can't put those rice farmers back where they want them ... We are against what the U.S. is doing wrong in other parts of the world as well as here ... What she's doing in South Vietnam is criminal. She is causing American soldiers to be murdered every day, killed every day, die every day for no reason at all." The author also cites Malcolm X as the one who clarified the global impact of oppression. Said Malcolm X, "It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negroes simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or a purely American problem. Rather we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."


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